The strength of a federal program designed to improve airline safety is also turning into its weakness: anonymity.
The Air Traffic Safety Action Program was designed to allow air traffic controllers to anonymously report problems without fear of reprisal. The idea was that employees of the Federal Aviation Administration would be more willing to come forward with information if they didn’t fear retaliation from their bosses.
And come forward they did, with some 41,000 anonymous complaints lodged since the program was instituted in 2008.
But the reports sometimes are so anonymous and vague that the FAA can't track down the actual nature of the problem or where it took place, the Transportation Department's inspector general warns in a report made pubic Monday.
And the anonymity is allowing some employees to take shots at their coworkers and supervisors and to settle petty employment and conduct disputes unrelated to flight safety, the report added.
"Failure to address these issues may lead to the perception that ATSAP is an amnesty program in which reports are automatically accepted, regardless of whether they qualify under the program's guidelines," the inspector general warned.
Information from the ATSAP is sent to an Event Review Committee, which provides the FAA with recommendations and direction to resolve safety issues. A number of problems have been fixed using the reporting system, such as fixing some communication problems at a Chicago air traffic facility, the report said.
But the program is not being used to its full potential, the inspector general said. About 50 percent of the reports received are about issues not reported through normal FAA safety channels, leaving the review committee with little ability to verify if the claims are true. And the committee does not do its own investigation of reports, for fear of exposing the mistakes to managers who might discourage employees from reporting future problems, the report said.
The agency seems to believe “that maintaining strict confidentiality supersedes the need for reliable and accurate data,” the inspector general said.
But the FAA is working to make it easier to track what problems are happening where, making them easier to fix. The agency said it is reviewing the situation, and should have a solution in place by the end of the year.
And as for reports that are verified as true, air traffic controllers have been able to do little to correct the issues due to the secrecy placed on the reports, the inspector general said.
“One manager told us that when he requested information regarding his facility’s operational errors, the information that he received was so heavily redacted, with times and operational positions removed, that he was unable to use it for any significant analysis,” the report said.
The FAA said it would take most of the inspector general’s recommendations into consideration and use them to improve the program, but it defended the anonymous complaint system. "No other safety program has identified and fixed more local and systemic issues than the Air Traffic Safety Action Program," FAA said.
The FAA said it has implemented a pilot program at several facilities to allow greater access to the safety reports while maintaining the anonymity of the original whistleblowers.
Because the program is relatively new, the investigation also discovered that managers don’t quite understand what’s allowed under the regulations. Bosses are not allowed to punish their employees due to reports to the ATSAP, but they are allowed to give additional training to employees and discuss with them problem issues to try to clear the mistakes up. Yet the study found that many managers were “under the erroneous impression that once an ATSAP report had been filed, they could no longer discuss the event with employees.”
The program is recent - started in 2008 and completed in October 2010 - and the FAA is still developing ways to identify safety trends and share the information with individual airports and facilities, the report said. The agency has received more than 41,000 reports since the start of the program.
Yet no formal process is in place yet to see if the program is working. The FAA has not developed a way yet to evaluate the review board’s decisions and to see if they are increasing overall safety, the watchdog report said.
